A funny thing that I have noticed about superstars is how rare it is to repeat success.  There are many obvious examples from the ranks of corporate CEO’s, when many highly lauded executives have moved on to another opportunity only to meet abject failure.  Robert Nardelli from GE to Home Depot, John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple, Carol Bartz from Autodesk to Yahoo are just a few of the more high profile examples.  They all had varying length tenures, but they all suffered from the same problem.  They had extensive skills but those skills did not translate in the new environment.

This skills vs. environment issue is something I have seen play out again and again across many types of roles and levels of responsibility.  In a HR tech startup I co-founded, one project involved analyzing the executive training program for a Fortune 100 firm.  The program trained highly prized recruits for two years to groom them for senior roles within one of the business units.  However, many of the recruits had quit once the program concluded.  It was discovered that people who stayed and thrived had one thing the other recruits did not have; a strong background in research and development.  It did not matter that the recruits were Ivy League MBA’s with impeccable credentials or that the company was a highly respected firm that won numerous best employer awards.  If the person did not fit well into the organization, the relationship never worked.

Studies bear out much of the dichotomy between a job candidate’s skills and long-term success.  Leadership IQ looked into why newly hired employees fail and concluded that 89% failed for reasons other than not having the requisite skills for the job.  Many of the factors cited such as motivation, temperament, communications and such all point to the fact that while skills are important, they may have less of a factor in job performance than we have come to expect.

One might be excused for coming to the conclusion that hiring is at best a crap shoot.  Many of the tools that we have become familiar with seem to do a poor job at actually assessing talent.  However, there are ways to reduce the risk of hiring failures by being aware of common traps one makes during the hiring process when evaluating candidates.  The following three points cover the most egregious yet correctable mistakes when hiring for highly critical roles:

• Job Title Divergence – One mistake is thinking that a particular job title encapsulates one set of immutable and easily transferable skills.  The more responsibility and ownership one has over the direction and execution of corporate goals, the greater variability in the skills required to be successful.  This is because the role is less about a set of tasks to be completed (thus more easily defined in a job description), and more about leadership skills, decision making and higher level analytical thinking.  These “softer skills” tend to be missed in most tests and interview scripts that focus on technical and functional job skills.  However, a larger part of one’s success in a job owes more to skills that are not as easy to capture on a test.
• Past Performance Bias – Just like investments, past success is a poor barometer for future performance.  While it can demonstrate one’s bias towards action, what made a person successful in past roles may not transfer well into the other job (because of Job Title Divergence).  Looking at the historical record can color the candidate vetting and decision making process because at the risk of offending a highly “pedigreed” candidate, there is a tendency to soft ball the assessment process.  This came to light in my HR startup where a client had a series of VP of manufacturing hires fail in quick succession even though the candidates had excellent track records.  We performed a deep analysis of the skills required for the role, then found a candidate that was completely outside the industry that was more of a fit based on the newer profile.  The lesson was to focus more on the skills (covering functional, management, and leadership domains) needed for the job during the hiring process rather than on past performance.
• Culture Fit Dissonance – While the first two mistakes are serious, discounting or completely ignoring the issue of cultural fit within the broader organization has lethal results.  Mark Hurd was prasied as a great hire when HP first brought him onboard as CEO, yet several years later after his departure HP was in disarray and demoralized.  The “HP way” was about innovation and product focus, but the Hurd way was about sales and money management.  Culture fit is not something that can be immediately gleaned from a resume or at a distance.  Even the cursory interview or two does not work.  Mark Zuckerburg spent 50 hours in total over the course of many meetings and many months with Sheryl Sandburg before hiring her.  It was obvious she was that proverbial “A player” and had the requisite skills, but Mark had to be sure she would fit in at Facebook.

So, what is the most important lessons to take away from this?  Do not underestimate the damage caused by the misalignment of culture in your hiring!  It is a slow killer and something that is hard to recognize when you are under the impression that everyone around you is an “A player”.  That is the heavy selection bias that colors our viewpoint when it comes to evaluating talent.  We dismiss the poor hires as bad apples, disgruntled employees, or simply liars.  On the other hand, we overestimate employees that we deem great hires as having superior skills.  The reality is that being highly skilled is only part of the equation.  Talent can only thrive when skills, culture, and goals meet.

This is not to say that there are not extraordinary people that seem to have that “A player” aura.  Steve Jobs managed to resurrect his early career to become one of the most legendary business leaders of our generation.  Richard Branson would be another excellent example of being massively successful in a number of endeavors.  However, these are entrepreneurs that defy categorization.  They are not people that are simply plugged into someone else’s culture; they create culture.  They would never be people that you hire, because they are outsized personalities and overwhelming forces of charisma, energy, and conviction.

Do not get caught in the game of hiring A players and chasing talent.  Have the strength of conviction that your culture and hiring process are sound.  If you have a compelling vision, a promising product, and a good network, you can find talented people to join your team.  The people that show genuine excitement about your idea, give up sleep and weekends and fat paychecks, and show initiative are your true A players.  Those are the people that are going to stick it out with you when things are rough.

This week was a prolific one on the Strong Opinions.  We recommended that cats stop doing startups and stick with licking themselves, showed how to cyberstalk people, demonstrated egregious social media snobbery, cut down the digital content middlemen to size, exposed Christmas to be the 800lb gorilla of holidays, and showed salespeople to not be totally useless.

• Stop Telling Cats to Do Startups
• Quick Profile on People
• Being a Social Media Snob
• Ownership and Middlemen in a Digital Age
• The War On Christmas? Think Again…
• Salespeople As Tech CEO’s

Since I know you did all your Christmas shopping ahead of time, there are no excuses for not catching up on these articles of mass awesomeness.  Enjoy and happy reading!

I am a Jets fan.  Yes, please feel free to laugh at me.  While the past couple of years have been fun, this year has bought to the forefront a troubling aspect of the team that was glossed over the past two years when the Jets went to back to back AFC championship games.  In short, the team is inconsistent and it is not only my perceptions either.

The team certainly has the talent and experience and the strategy.  However, the defense that is touted as elite routinely gets burned for 30 plus points a game.  While Sanchez is now in his third year and has elite wide receivers, his performance at times has been woefully poor and his overall stats are not much better over last year.  While the strategy is ground and pound, neither has been in evidence this season.  While all the pieces seem to be there, the combination has not translated into consistent execution.

This is not really a post about football however.  Inconsistency affects all teams at some point.  This is different than trying something and having it fail.  Failing is simply the process of gaining the experience that allows you to become consistent.  This is about doing things that should be rote with people that should know what they are doing, but for whatever reason the results are mediocre at best.

Whether it is the Jets, a dysfunctional team, or a company on a losing streak, you may point to inconsistency, but it is not the reason.  You see, inconsistency is not a cause, it is a symptom.  What is happening in these cases is a lack of cohesion.

What is cohesion?  The root word is “cohere” which the textbook defines it as a verb meaning to stick together or be united.  That is an apt description for team chemistry.  You are sticking together and uniting all the individual parts into a whole that is greater than the sums of its parts.  Without cohesion, there is little hope in getting positive results and achieving goals because the whole is not united.  While all the individual parts may function well on their own, as a group, nothing comes together in a way that is additive to the group dynamic.  It is as if one day your brain decided to walk but your left leg decided to hop and right leg did high kicks.  The result is that you are not going anywhere.

I see the lack of cohesion in the Jets and I see it in small startups.  Everyone on the surface says they want the same thing, but motives and actions say differently.  What is worse is that the lack of cohesion can remain dormant when things are going well, but quickly swell up to outsized proportions when bumps come along resulting in a combustible and explosive situation.

For this very reason, it is important not to underestimate the value of culture when putting together a team or a startup business.  You can bring on superstars, but you need to bring them in so that their talents and attitude meshes with the whole and they can adopt the ethos and goals of the organization.  Going back to the sports world, the team people look to as the epitome of consistency is the Yankees.  Why is that?  Because the organization trumps any one star and the culture is so strong that it keeps egos in check.  The same holds true for the (hated) New England Patriots.  They win because the whole team is on the same playbook and the objectives are very much clear.

If you are seeing that performance across the board is not to expectations, you might very well have a cohesion problem.  Make sure you bring together the team and get firm commitment towards the goals.  Probe deep to see if there are any areas of discontent or loss of enthusiasm or difference in motivations.  Sometimes you need to play psychologist and other times you just need to lay down the law.  In the event of a clear culture mismatch, you may need to part ways with some folks that are not meshing with the team.  Lastly, take a look at yourself and evaluate your own performance and goals.  It is worthwhile to get out of the building and get outside of the inner circle echo chamber just to get a fresh perspective.

Another omnibus roundup on Strong Opinions where we talked about Moneyball and evaluating talent, ruminating on the word “disruption”, becoming an “expert”, using frames of reference, overthinking, overbuying tech, and fixing our college system.  Check out what you missed from the past couple of weeks:

• Moneyball - Confidence Vs. Skills
• So You Want to Disrupt the Market?
• Ten Steps to Becoming a Notable Expert in an Anything
• Startup CEO as Chief Psychologist
• The Danger of Overthinking
• The Lean Personal Tech Movement
• Is College Worth the Cost?
• Trouble with College and STEM Programs

Enjoy and happy reading!

It starts with the frame of reference.  This is not about me nerding out on the joy of physics, but a tool that I have used on a regular basis in understanding the dynamics of people and teams.  You see, when you understand your people from their own perspectives, then you can build a strong company culture and a strong foundation for leading your startup*.

We all wish everyone was transparent and professional in the workplace.  The reality of course is that is hardly ever the case, and this includes people in early stage startups.  There are plenty of stories of startups that experienced epic  blow-ups between co-founders, employees fired as quickly as they were hired, and battle royale team in-fighting.  If you read into some of the startup post-mortems, you can even see hints of team dissention and chaos in between the lines.

It is best to head off these conflicts early.  There are going to be missives, misunderstandings, and mistakes that occur as should be expected.  It is a startup and things move fast and furious.  Often times words are taken out of context or off the cuff remarks taken too literally.  As the CEO, it is your responsibility to be on top of the group dynamic.  You need to understand what is going on in the heads of every single person of your team.

You become the company chief psychologist through frames of reference.  This is not mind reading, but a way of placing yourself in the shoes of others.  By envisioning yourself in those shoes, you can begin to understand motive and behaviors that would otherwise lack context when you are simply looking at a situation from your own point of view.

Frame of reference is more than mere empathy though.  Empathy is an important trait and a critical component of emotional intelligence.  Relating to the feelings of others is the first part of learning to understand behaviors and connecting with people.  The deeper analytical assessment of the situation however, divorced from pure emotion, is the real strength of using frames of reference.

There are three core elements of frames of reference:

• Work Frame – Events at work that could be influencing decisions and behavior.  This could be things such as customer problems, disagreements with coworkers, or other pressures.  These should be the easiest to see however since it all happens nearby and is difficult to hide.  It is a startup after all and as CEO, you should be aware of much of what is happening on the ground in the early days.
• Home Frame- The issues that happen away from the work environment that generally fall into the family or spouse/significant other bucket.  There are eight life events in particular that are highly stressful; Death, Divorce, Marriage, Injury / Illness, Job Loss, Pregnancy / Birth, Jail, and Moving.  If someone in your startup is undergoing one of these events, you can be assured that things are not simply “fine” or “OK”.  Be sensitive to these situations and take into account the pressures involved when evaluating performance.
• Personal Frame – This is the hardest frame to see.  Upbringing, innate personality, and the pressures of external stresses have a major impact on shaping one’s psyche.  This is the real person, not the one that puts on a mask when in social situations.  This is the one however that we are most connected to at a subconscious level.  When you brought on a person as a co-founder or employee, very often it was the subconscious connection that swayed the final decision.  We tend to associate with like-minded people, so while this is the most obscure frame to penetrate, it is the one that in most cases mirrors your own personal frame.

The best way to employ these frames of reference is to foster a supportive and transparency company culture.  As CEO, make it known that you are there to listen if there are problems or people need to talk.  Make an effort to spend time with each and every person not talking about work.  People should feel that regardless of the challenges in their own lives, that they have people at work that have their backs and can openly talk to.

Beware however in using the frames of reference method.  This is not an opportunity to pry into the lives of your team nor is it a pass to excuse behavior detrimental to the business.  Some people are simply not comfortable opening up at work, especially to someone that is their boss.  Do not press the issue otherwise your efforts may backfire.  There are also times when actions and performance are simply not acceptable, to the point that it is affecting co-workers and impacting business.  In these cases, it is time for some tough love and laying out clearly on the job expectations.

Looking at the world through frames of reference is not an answer or a solution.  Think of this rather as an approach to gain greater awareness of your work environment, to better relate to your teammates, and to prepare and accommodate for potential issues before they become problematic.  There are enough challenges that sprout up in a startup, so it pays dividends to build a strong and cohesive team that can trust and depend on each other.  By understanding others and their situations through their eyes, you can begin to foster that supportive company culture.

*NOTE There are other methods of leadership as well including acting like a micro-managing dictator, being the aloof visionary, or taking the hard-driving business results route, it is up to you to decide what type of work environment you want.  Consider that culture impacts everything from hiring, business performance, customer relationships, business development, and the type of investors you take on, so choose wisely.